ClickFix accounted for 47% of attacks in Microsoft notifications, while built-in tools appeared in 84% of Bitdefender’s high-severity incidents.
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Sality botnet infrastructure dismantled in joint global takedown
International law enforcement agencies and private partners have seized Sality malware infrastructure in a joint action aiming to disrupt and take down the peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet.
As part of this operation, supported by Europol and Eurojust, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and DCIS seized Sality-linked domains in the United States, while authorities in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania seized additional Sality-linked domains hosted in Europe.
CrowdStrike’s Counter Adversary Operations team, in collaboration with international law enforcement and private industry partners, also dismantled the botnet’s control channels in a peer-to-peer sinkhole operation that isolated infected machines.
SonicWall warns of actively exploited SMA1000 zero-day flaws
SonicWall warned customers that threat actors are chaining two new SMA1000 zero-day vulnerabilities in remote code execution attacks.
The first is a maximum-severity command injection flaw (CVE-2026–83548) found in the SMA1000 Appliance WorkPlace interface that stems from a server-side request forgery (SSRF) weakness.
This actively exploited zero-day chain also targets a command injection vulnerability (CVE-2026–83549) in the SMA1000 Appliance Management Console that attackers with admin privileges can exploit to execute arbitrary OS commands on vulnerable devices.
Hackers abuse Faronics Deploy admin tool to install ScreenConnect
Phishing actors are abusing the legitimate Faronics Deploy endpoint-management platform to gain remote administrative control over victim computers and install the ScreenConnect remote support software.
In activity observed between July 21 and August 20, Faronics-themed lures reached more than 457 endpoints via emails disguised as invoices, tax documents, or other business files.
Faronics Deploy is a cloud-based endpoint management platform that allows IT administrators to remotely enroll and manage computers, deploy software, and execute scripts.
Each human breath acts as unique fingerprint for thinking
Breathing shapes thinking, attention, memory, perception, emotional regulation, and overall mental health by affecting activity in a variety of brain areas. One way breathing affects brain activity is through its relationship with rhythmic patterns of neural activity, or brain waves. Eena Kosik-Rose and Bradley Voytek, from the University of California, San Diego, led a study exploring this relationship by assessing how individual breaths at rest influence brain waves. This work is published in JNeurosci.
Leveraging an epilepsy patient population with brain electrode implants for treatment purposes, the researchers compared the shapes of brain waves to the complex, variable shapes that individual human breaths create. The shape created by inhalation and exhalation corresponded to the shape of widespread neural activity in brain areas that support emotion, motivation, pleasure, thinking, attention, and memory.
Researchers have examined the relationship between these processes and breathing more simplistically-such as by looking at how breathing fast or slow influences brain activity and emotions or thought processes. But we found that this relationship is more nuanced than previously thought. Each breath you take has a fingerprint, so to speak, of impact on brain activity and mental state.
Urolithiasis in patients with cancer
In this Review, the authors explore the risk factors for urolithiasis in patients with cancer, the associations between urolithiasis and urinary tract cancers, the pathogenesis of urolithiasis in patients with urinary tract cancer and special considerations for management of urolithiasis after urinary tract diversion for cancer.
Single amino acid swap expands nanoparticle vaccine approach to influenza viruses
Influenza viruses constantly shapeshift to evade recognition by the immune system. This shapeshifting occurs in critical proteins like hemagglutinin (HA), which controls how the virus attaches to human cells before entering them. Influenza viruses can evade immunity in two major ways: through the gradual accumulation of mutations that make HA harder for the immune system to recognize or through reassortment events that can introduce substantially different viral proteins and potentially lead to flu pandemics. To address this challenge, seasonal flu vaccines remain the primary approach because they can be developed to target the flu viruses circulating most predominantly in a given season.
Now, in a Nature Communications study published Aug. 13, 2026, scientists at Scripps Research offer a blueprint for stabilizing the various versions of influenza’s HA protein and using it to build nanoparticle vaccine candidates. Influenza is the latest target made compatible with the nanoparticle technology, specifically called self-assembling protein nanoparticles (SApNPs), which work by organizing many copies of viral proteins into clusters that the immune system can more easily recognize. This framework could eventually be applied to inform the design of next-generation vaccines across diverse flu viruses.
“Influenza HA is naturally poised to change shape by design because it needs to undergo a dramatic structural change during viral entry,” says senior author Jiang Zhu, a professor at Scripps Research. “What I’m trying to do is to find a magic trigger that, no matter what flu strains come along, mutating that trigger will make a stable antigen that can be used in a nanoparticle vaccine.”